Literal Tribalism: The Darkest Chapters in the Bible and How They Apply to a Divided America

Long ago, the songwriter Rich Mullins, ever the contemplative poet, sang about the Genesis narrative of Jacob’s epically dysfunctional family, “Well it’s right there in the Bible, so it must not be a sin,” not endorsing such a view, but modeling the confusion we often feel when we read the Old Testament and see the supposed “heroes of the faith” doing terrible things. Modern readers easily and often forget that Old Testament narratives regularly report the actions—both godly and sinful—of their characters, and they leave it up to the reader to understand when those reports are for praise and when they are for criticism.

The last five chapters of the Old Testament book of Judges, often called the Judges epilogue, are one of the most extreme cases. Judges chronicles Israel’s experience after the conquest of the promised land and before the advent of the kingship. The nation largely existed in a tribal structure—the twelve tribes of Israel, each descending from and named for one of Jacob’s sons. Divided by valleys and low mountain ranges, and with little central authority, the tribes occasionally acted together as “all Israel,” a unity the author of the book wrote to encourage. More often, though, the book testifies that they acted more out of a tribal affiliation, failing to pursue that “all Israel” theme.

Indeed, the book largely examines the failure of Israel’s tribal organization and the resulting leadership model of the judges, who served as charismatic military deliverers, rarely as legal decision-makers. (Deborah is an exception.) The main body of the book follows the pattern set out in Judges 2:11–19, which provides the “Judges cycle,” a literary structure for each judge whose narratives comprise chapters 3–16. The net effect is a chronicle of accelerating moral decline under Israel’s tribalistic structure. The last five chapters then bring the point home. Notably, these stories didn’t happen last, even though they come last in the book. Marked off by a separate structure, their position at the end is thematic, not chronological. They detail four terrible incidents that show the utter collapse of Israel’s morality during the judges’ rule.

These five chapters are a dismal read, the appalling conclusion to the steady moral and political decline manifest through those Judges cycles that form the core of the book. Judges 17 records an Ephraimite named Micah, who steals a vast sum from his mother. When found out, his mother uses the silver to make an idol, and the two of them hire a wandering Levite to become their personal idolatrous priest. Judges 18 then records the tribe of Dan, having failed to settle its allotted land, finding Micah and the Levite, stealing his wealth and idol, and then massacring a peaceful people that God had not commanded them to displace. Judges 19 provides the pitiful story of a different Levite not just keeping a concubine but then letting her be repeatedly raped and then killed to save himself from a crowd in the Benjamite town of Gibeah that wanted to rape him. The Levite then dismembers her corpse, sending pieces throughout Israel to rally them to war against the tribe of Benjamin, which itself gathers to defend the men of Gibeah. Judges 20 describes that war and the near destruction of the entire tribe of Benjamin, leaving only a few survivors. Finally, Judges 21 shows those other tribes in a quandary. Having sworn in the heat of the moment that none of their daughters should ever marry a Benjamite, how did they avoid the tribe now becoming extinct? Their solution: to kill all men, women, and children from the area of Jabesh-Gilead, leaving alive only four hundred young virgins. Then they kidnap those young virgins and give them to the Benjamites as “wives.”

As the author of Judges concludes his book, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” To anyone with a moral sense at all then or now—the horror of these chapters is unmistakable. If we ever imagined that reading something reported in the Bible makes it acceptable, Judges 19–21 quickly disabuses us. These chapters show the moral results of a literal tribalism.

With the U.S. election inbound, this term “tribalism” is again trending, along with associated near-synonyms such as “partisanship,” just as it did in the last couple of election cycles. In preparation, I recently spent some time reading thoughtful posts and articles from the last round of elections. As Joel Achenbach noted in the Washington Post, “Social scientists have taken note of these hardening political divisions, pumping out academic articles and books that add data to what appears to be a steady rise in tribalism.”

According to Achenbach, “This country, though politically fractious since its founding, is more polarized than ever, the rhetoric more inflammatory, the rage more likely to curdle into hate. It’s ugly out there.” Academic studies show that Americans see the nation as more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

We should be careful to avoid a recency bias. The 1960’s—a time of convulsive cultural change—give the 2020’s a run for their money. So might the Gilded Age. So, we should probably be careful when we say that our time is the worst of it. That said, few observers would argue that the United States’ political system and culture are less polarized than in 2016, and certainly since the 1980’s. We are at a high peak of polarization and tribalism, even if it is one peak in a range of high mountains.

In analyzing this American moment, various pundits, political scientists, and cultural analysts have proposed any number of causes for our tribalistic moment. Politically, aggressive redistricting and partisan gerrymandering—the drawing of district lines to favor one party over the other—have contributed. When a district is safe, the general election is a formality, and the primary becomes the only race that matters, a situation that rewards party purity over centrism.

Yet, our tribalism goes deeper than that. Physical sorting, discussed in the journalist Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, and media sorting have created echo chambers that simply reaffirm our biases. Smart phones and the internet contribute, too. Before that, there was the arrival of cable TV news channels.

But even beyond all of these factors, there is this: human beings have deeply tribalistic impulses. Mr. Achenbach interviewed Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis, who stated, “…in the process of defining who is in and who is out of a group, enmity and derision can arise independently of any rational reason for it.” Stanford political psychologist Shanto Iyengar put it this way: “Homo sapiens is a social species; group affiliation is essential to our sense of self. Individuals instinctively think of themselves as representing broad socioeconomic and cultural categories rather than as distinctive packages of traits.”

Such tribalism is deep in us, not because we are Americans—or Tanzanians, or Singaporeans, or Germans, or any other nationality—but because we are human. And while both Christakis and Iyengar, with Achenbach following them, anchor this deep human tendency in evolution, we can depart from them and anchor it biblically—in sin—while still recognizing what they rightly note: that such polarization and tribalism are endemic to humanity, with or without smartphones, cable news, sorted media or living environments, or anything else.

But what is tribalism? Political scientists and sociologists have their definitions: fierce loyalty to one’s social or cultural group and the tendency to view politics strictly as an “us versus them” battle where group identity overrides objective facts. But the book of Judges helps define the term biblically, though admittedly not exhaustively.

Opposing tribalism does not require ignoring differences. Affinities are normal and inevitable. The mere act of group affiliation is hardly tribalistic. Someone’s soccer team, bridge club, book club, church, synagogue—those are affinities, which are not just natural but often constructive.

The Israelites were organized into twelve tribes. They did have family affinities, and that was by God’s design. Yet “all Israel” was to be primary. Recognizing and identifying with one’s own cultural and family background, one’s own ethnicity, musical preferences, political opinions, religious beliefs—none of those are, strictly speaking, tribalism, though each could become it. What tips into tribalism is when those distinctions become predominant, especially when they override ethical considerations. We must correctly order our identifications. If not, we will fall into the sin of tribalism instead of the God-given richness of human diversity. It’s all about keeping things in the right balance.

In Judges, tribalism includes ignoring the sins of our own tribe simply because they are our own tribe. When the men of the other eleven tribes gathered for war against Benjamin in chapter 20, they first requested the perpetrators of the crime:

And the tribes of Israel sent men through all the tribe of Benjamin, saying, “What evil is this that has taken place among you? Now therefore give up the men, the worthless fellows in Gibeah, that we may put them to death and purge evil from Israel.” (Judges 20:12–13a)

Instead of assenting to this judgment, however, the Benjamites put tribe above justice:

But the Benjamites would not listen to the voice of their brothers, the people of Israel. Then the people of Benjamin came together out of the cities to Gibeah to go out to battle against the people of Israel. (Judges 20:13b–14)

To the Benjamites, tribe was more important than righteousness. And that is the danger. When we put tribe above ethics, we end up on the wrong side from God, just as the tribe of Benjamin did.

Chapter 18 of Judges details the attack upon Laish, an innocent people, one God had not commanded Israel to displace. As such, Laish was not subject to the herem ban, to destruction. The actions of the tribe of Dan were without divine sanction, willful murder of their own accord. In fact, almost no one in these narratives looks good—not the Levite, not Micah, not the Danites, and not even the single old man from Gibeah (Judges 19:19–20), who does offer hospitality and tries to keep the Levite protected overnight but who also offers his own virgin daughter and the concubine to the mob.

Modern tribalism shows the same tendencies, and not simply in the political arena. Having written previously about the positive analogy of being a sports fan (which I stand by!), I’m not blind to how even sports can pull us into the same tribalistic mode. Let’s not fool ourselves. When the player is on our team, we minimize obvious fouls, but if he or she were on the other team, we would be outraged at the play. Even if we admit our side violated the rules, we hardly have the same emotional reaction we would have if the same foul were committed against our beloved athletic warriors.

Further, tribalism includes emotion over argument, hatred and demonization over careful and rational thought. Impartiality and balance are jettisoned. The news becomes a marker of identity. In tribalism, emotion rules over rationality, consistency, even doctrine. That the Benjamites are fundamentally declared other, not worth being brothers in Israel, is clear from the other tribes’ aforementioned vow to never allow any marriage between a Benjamite and their daughters. The other side is no longer common to us, even a kinsman, but an enemy never to be forgiven.

This is exactly what occurs in political polarization. In place of a marketplace of ideas and the vital discussion of differences—differences that matter—discourse has moved towards emotional appeals to dominate the other side. The other party is viewed not just as wrong but as an evil threat. The other “tribe” is viewed as angry, flawed, immoral, and incapable of basic decency, even inhuman and subhuman.

Tribalism also makes independence unacceptable. In many forums, especially those toward each end of the political or culture war spectrum, the knives first come out not for the other extreme but for the independent voice who actually is closer to the one wielding the knife. If a person wants to listen to the other side, to consider or engage, he or she is suspected of compromise rather than credited with character. As Will Reinhart noted in 2024:

Not taking a side on a contentious moral and political issue can sometimes be seen as being worse than holding the opposing view. Not taking sides can sometimes be seen as strategically deceptive. There is a reputational risk for not taking sides awaiting those who opt not to do so.

A race to the extreme begins, where even people who agree with us—just not with sufficient zeal—are run out of the camp, even though they would ultimately have been in a coalition that was on “our side,” just not as strongly.

In our politicized world, it is easy to think, “I know where he’s going” and to start powering up our defense shields, whether whataboutism or anything else. But my purpose is not to determine what is wrong with the US political system and how to fix it—though we should note that our faith does impact how we think about that system. Everything detailed above could be applied to both parties today. Nor is this caveat meant to “both sides” the political argument in a way that equates the two parties. In real life, it’s often the case that one side is acting worse than another, even while neither is acting close to perfectly.

My point here, though, is different. As followers of Jesus Christ, two essential questions about our faith and tribalism instead present themselves.

The first, and more straightforward, is how we define our tribe.

The Old Testament story doesn’t end with Judges. The full refrain in the Judges epilogue is, “In those days Israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Twice, as the broader frame in the epilogue, the text gives that full refrain (17:6, 21:25). But twice in between, the book gives a shorter refrain, simply stating, “In those days Israel had no king” (18:1, 19:1). While the Judges epilogue clearly dwells on the moral degradation of Israel, then, it also proposes a solution: the kingship.

And yet, the story of the kingship in Israel and Judah turns out to be just as dismal as the story of the Judges. Saul, the first king, had to be comically smoked out from hiding among the baggage so he could be proclaimed king (1 Samuel 10:17–24). He mobilized the nation by terror (1 Sam. 11:7), made rash leadership decisions (1 Sam. 14:24–30), and failed to obey God (1 Sam. 15). Rejected by God, he descended into madness (1 Sam. 16–20, 28). Then David represents the high point of the kingship in the Old Testament—David, including his adultery with, and quite possibly rape of, Bathsheba, his murder of her husband Uriah, and his resulting family chaos.

And from there it was downhill. After David came his son Solomon, the last king of the united monarchy, whose rule was outwardly glorious and yet declined into apostate worship of other gods. After Solomon, the kingdom divided. The northern kingdom of Israel immediately turned to idolatry and apostasy, quickly duplicating all the practices of not just Israel under the judges, but even of the Canaanites. And, with only a few bright spots in the Judean kingship, the southern kingdom of Judea eventually did the same. By the time of king Manasseh, Judah was characterized by foreign gods, child sacrifice, temple prostitution, exploitation of the poor, and the abandonment of justice. The kingship led the nation so badly that God judged it by allowing the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem, including even God’s temple. As one of my friends put it, “The Bible offers an institutional fix and then spends four centuries documenting its failure.”

So why did kingship fail? For a simple reason: human sin. An institutional fix clearly was not enough. What was needed was a true king, but a king who could bring moral revival, one who would give his people a new heart, one in which God’s law would be within them, written on their hearts (Jeremiah 31:33). And in Jesus, that king has come. And we are those who have received it.

As followers of Jesus who have given our lives to him, this answers the question of how we define our tribe. It is all those who follow Jesus as Lord and Savior, all those whose common confession means their names—and ours—are written in the Lamb’s book of life. And while this requires more than a verbal profession (Matthew 7:22), the beliefs necessary are not terribly many. All such believers are our brothers and sisters in Christ now, not later, once they get their theology right, their politics right, their cultural allegiances right. Our connection in Jesus is meant to be our real identity and our real unity—more robust, more essential, more foundational than tribe, nation, or tongue.

Jesus made this concrete. In Luke 10 he made the hero of the story a Samaritan, an ethnic group his own audience despised. It was the priest and Levite who passed to the other side. Jesus kept company with tax collectors, who had collaborated with Rome. He healed and blessed a Samaritan leper in Luke 17 and spoke at length to a Samaritan woman in John 4, the longest conversation he has with anyone in the Gospels.

At this point, the expected faith-based call is, “So, can’t you see that we are all Christians? Can we not be at peace with each other? Can we not live out Jesus’ vision for unity in John 17, something that the post-COVID, highly politicized American church has seemingly forgotten?” That call is true and necessary. But it isn’t what I’m after here.

If all we do is switch our tribal allegiance to a different, bigger tribe, we have yet to let the warning of Judges 17–21 sink in. After all, in secular contexts tribal allegiances have changed, just from local to national, and we are hardly the better for it. For instance, Reinhart also noted:

Even if you give away online subscriptions for newspapers, people still don’t consume local news. In this experiment conducted in Pennsylvania, 2,529 individuals were offered free online subscriptions, but only 44 subscribed. It seems that “contemporary local newspapers may face a demand-side dilemma: the engaged citizens who formerly read them now prefer national, partisan content.”

In Judges 21, the last chapter of the book, the eleven tribes of Israel realize they have overreacted. As noted above, they run the real possibility of no longer being the twelve tribes of Israel and instead becoming the eleven tribes of Israel. There are few Benjamites left, the other eleven tribes having massacred all of Benjamin they could find (Judg. 20:48), including (Judg. 21:16) apparently all the women. Yet, they have sworn to cut the remaining Benjamite men off from marrying their daughters. So, in Judges 21:6, their anger finally having been exhausted, they have compassion on their fellow Israelites, the few remaining men of Benjamin. They finally shift their understanding from civil war to all Israel together.

And yet, that change only leads them to more sin, the massacre of Jabesh-Gilead and the kidnapping of its virgins. And yet, even that does not exhaust the sin. Seeing as 400 forced marriages is not enough, such that even if some Benjamite clans would survive, others will now disappear, they move to yet another sin. In verses 16–21 they concoct a plan to help the Benjamites who still have no wife to kidnap and forcibly wed young women from Shiloh who come out to worship God. In verse 22, they coldly turn back the complaints of those women’s fathers and brothers with an obvious sophistry meant to get around the technicality of their vow: “And when their fathers or their brothers come to complain to us, we will say to them, ‘Grant them graciously to us, because we did not take for each man of them his wife in battle, neither did you give them to them, else you would now be guilty.’” (Judg. 21:22). Israel has redefined its tribal allegiance from one of the twelve tribes to all Israel, and doing so has only moved the locus of sin, overcorrecting into the very same dynamic, now ignoring—yet again—the sin of their own people.

Likewise, we must recognize that our true tribe is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, not any subsidiary group. Yet, if we stop there, we are not yet heeding the danger, because we can simply move the locus of tribalistic sin and risk repeating our same mistakes at the level of the church as a whole. We just swap to being tribal as “all the church” and getting in on the immorality. “Who is our tribe?” is a crucial question, but it isn’t the deepest or most important one.

The ultimate question is have we put our tribe—even the whole church—above the gospel? Do we do what Israel did in the era of the judges, excusing the sin because the sinner is one of ours? That is Judges 17–21 playing itself out all over again, only with a larger tribe.

When people in the church embrace and fall into deep immorality, we must say so. When sin is among us—especially when it is committed in our midst—we must call it out. We must repent of it, not circle the wagons and protect immorality and abuse within the church because they are “our people.”

The call of Christ’s church—his true church—is to live changed lives because of the grace we have received. We are saved by grace, not works—but faith without works is dead. Christians need to attend to both truths.

Sadly, many of the main moves in American Christianity in the past decades have been to bury and excuse horrific behavior because we want to protect our tribe, whether that tribe is our specific church, our denomination, or Christianity itself. The litany of names is long—Ravi Zacharias, Bill Gothard, and Jean Vanier, among many others—as is the litany of institutions: Mars Hill, Willow Creek, Hillsong, and the Southern Baptist abuse report. And those, of course, are just some of the highly public names. The list could be much longer, except that at the local level, issues simply get buried and never make national news. How can we speak to the culture if our own house is not in order? The whole point is that if we are Christians, we must own this. We must name this.

Further, those brave voices who have called out for justice have often suffered for it. After all, huge institutional interests are arrayed against them. Think of the number of women who have suffered because of their churches when they dared call out abuse. They are urged to forgive quickly, warned against gossip, and told that going public would damage the church’s witness. If they persist, they are recast as the problem—divisive, bitter, and unsubmissive—sometimes even disciplined or pushed out of membership while the accused remain in place.

Which brings us back to the Old Testament. The prophets regularly called out their own people for sin. While they occasionally called out other nations, they spent less time focusing on the sin of those outside the tribe of all Israel and instead spent most of their time calling out the injustices and sins of God’s own people, working to call their own tribe to repentance and righteousness.

As a result, the biggest danger to the Old Testament prophets, the group that often persecuted them, was, in fact, not the Gentiles, but Israel itself. Instead of persecution from outside God’s people, the biggest danger to God’s prophets, when they called out against injustice, was God’s own people. The priests of the northern kingdom of Israel accused Amos of treason and tried to run him out of the country (Amos 7:12). Jeremiah was thrown into a pit and left to starve to death until a member of the king’s court intervened to save him (Jer. 38:1–12). And many more. The cost of being a prophet was often being rejected by your own tribe, God’s people.

Sometimes one side, or the members of one side, really are wrong. It needs to be said, loudly and clearly, especially when it is our own side.

Because any label can be twisted, that very act of calling out that wrong often gets termed “tribalism.” But accuracy is simply accuracy, and not every hard truth is anchored in tribalism.  Once our house is in order, it is a good and necessary thing for the church to speak to our world, to declare right and wrong, to stand for the least of these and to defend the rights of all, including the abused, the stranger in our midst, the orphan, and the unborn.

In his book Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, Richard Bauckham writes that Jesus, like John the Baptist, “paid little attention to the Romans, because his priority was the renewal of God’s own people.” And certainly Paul’s epistles follow suit: they are overwhelmingly addressed to churches about their own conduct, not to the empire about its conduct.

This is not a plea to abandon the public sphere in favor of bland politeness. It is rather a plea to first care about our own morality, our own righteousness, before we turn to criticize those living in the secular world. Given the state of the American church in this moment, we need more prophets inside it—not in the sense of charismatic continuationists, but in the older, scriptural sense: those who confront their own people. We need people who call us away from a tribalism whose real purpose is to shield us from our own sin and who will name when the church is living at odds with the teachings and ethic of Jesus.

We should take stands on certain public matters, including matters of justice. But justice that stops at the boundary of our own tribe isn’t really justice. And a church that applies its standards outwardly instead of inwardly is merely mirroring the world’s tribalistic culture instead of shaping it. If we want to speak prophetically to our world, we first need to speak prophetically to ourselves. When we do, we will “shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15). We might even find we don’t have to speak that much to get our message across.